Q Acoustics 2010 review

A very revealing bookshelf speaker for those without space

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For

Incredibly revealing

Build quality

Against

Limited with bass

Q Acoustics is a recently formed house brand of Armour Home Electronics, the home of QED, Goldring, Alphason and many others. The speakers are all at, or around the budget end of the market and are aimed equally at sound-only and video applications – though the centre speaker, for instance, is clearly a little more specific.

The Q Acoustics 2010 is the smallest bookshelf model and at 150mm wide, it's absolutely par for the course among current mini-speakers.

It includes a paper-cone woofer, a soft-dome tweeter and a rear-mounted reflex port for which a foam bung is supplied (useful in near-wall siting).

The crossover is quite sophisticated and uses good-quality components, while the inside is lightly damped with synthetic wool. Terminals are on the base and accessories available include dedicated stands and wall-mounting brackets.

This is quite simply a shockingly revealing loudspeaker. We can give a simple example to illustrate that: one of the recordings we used for audition was a very familiar one of solo piano. Despite its familiarity, we had never previously been aware of some noise from the pianist's stool, which this speaker showed up clearly for what it is.

Similar insights attended various recordings and throughout we were deeply impressed by the amount of detail we were hearing. No, deep bass won't substitute from that of a good high-end floorstander and, at times, rhythm isn't necessarily the most convincing, but taken as a whole, however, this is a hell of a loudspeaker for its price.